INTERSPERSED REQUESTS: A NONAVERSIVE PROCEDURE FOR REDUCING AGGRESSION AND SELF-INJURY DURING INSTRUCTION

Interspersed requests are simple commands, with a high likelihood of being followed correctly, that are interspersed among instructional trials to increase the probability that a learner will attempt to perform new or difficult tasks without engaging in aggression or self-injurious behavior. This report presents two assessments of the effect of interspersed requests on aggression and self-injury during instruction. The participants were individuals with severe mental retardation who used aggression and self-injury to avoid difficult instructional situations. Results from both studies indicate that interspersed requests were effective at increasing the responsiveness of the learners to instructions and reducing levels of aggression and self-injury.     

CONTINGENT OBSERVATION: AN EFFECTIVE AND ACCEPTABLE PROCEDURE FOR REDUCING DISRUPTIVE BEHAVIOR OF YOUNG CHILDREN IN A GROUP SETTING1

Since a major task of childhood is learning to get along in a group without disrupting other children's activities, caregivers need explicit guidelines for gentle but effective procedures for dealing with disruptive behaviors in child-care settings. In a day-care center for normal 1- and 2-yr-old children, an effort was made to develop a procedure that appeared sufficiently humane and educational to be acceptable to parents and daycare workers, and yet effective in reducing disruptive play behaviors. Caregivers used the occasion of disruptive behavior to instruct the child in appropriate alternatives, then had the child sit on the periphery and observe the appropriate social behavior of the other children, “sit and watch”, for a brief period before inviting him or her to rejoin the play activities. The effectiveness of this procedure was compared with a method commonly recommended for use with young children: instructing the child, then distracting or redirecting the child to an alternative toy or activity. Contingent observation, combining instruction with a brief timeout (from being a participant in an activity to becoming an observer of the activity), proved considerably more effective in maintaining low levels of disruptions and was considered by caregivers and parents to be an appropriate and socially acceptable method of dealing with young children's disruptive behaviors. Therefore, contingent observation can be recommended for general use in day-care programs for young children.     

CONTINGENT EXERCISE: A MILD BUT POWERFUL PROCEDURE FOR SUPPRESSING INAPPROPRIATE VERBAL AND AGGRESSIVE BEHAVIOR

Two single-subject experiments were conducted in public school classrooms for severely emotionally disturbed children. Both experiments investigated the effects of a treatment requiring a child to exhibit a simple exercise task after a verbal or aggressive response, using reversal and multiple-baseline designs. The independent variable, contingent exercise, required standing up and sitting on the floor five to ten times contingent on an inappropriate behavior. It was found that contingent exercise was easy to carry out, and following it, the child quickly returned to the learning task that had been interrupted by the inappropriate behavior. The contingent exercise procedure required a minimum of prompting or manual guidance. Although contingent exercise was not topographically related to the inappropriate response, it decreased those responses dramatically. The results suggested that contingent exercise was not only more powerful than DRO but also could be administered independently. It was concluded that contingent exercise may constitute an alternative procedure that can be used by therapists confronted with severely abnormal behaviors. It would appear to be particularly relevant in settings where procedures such as timeout and painful consequences find restricted use. Finally, a number of guidelines have been proposed as a safeguard against the misuse of this mild but powerful procedure.     

STIMULUS GENERALIZATION AND EQUIVALENCE CLASSES: A MODEL FOR NATURAL CATEGORIES

Two three-member classes were formed by training AB and BC using a conditional discrimination procedure. The A and B stimuli were nonsense syllables, and the C stimuli were sets of “short” or “long” lines. To test for equivalence, C1 or C2 was presented as a sample with A1 and A2 as comparisons. Once the class-related comparison was chosen consistently, different line lengths were substituted for the training lines in the CA tests. In general, the likelihood of choosing a given comparison was an inverse function of the difference in the length of the test line from the training line. Stimuli in an equivalence class became functionally related not only to each other but also to novel stimuli that resembled a member of the equivalence class. The combination of primary generalization and equivalence class formation, then, can serve as a model to account for the development of naturally occurring categories.